How can I live in your world of ideas?

Note

How can I live in your world of ideas? takes its unwieldy name from the caption of a cartoon I drew in college, which depicts a young penguin and his parents in a museum, looking at a painting of a naked woman. This piece starts out as a passacaglia or theme and vari­a­tions, but is then grad­u­ally over­taken by extra­ne­ous material from some­where else entirely. Orig­i­nally written for two pianos as part of Shy and Mighty. I tran­scribed it for a solo pianist (myself) because I needed some­thing to play at short notice; in its solo version, however, the pianist must work much more stren­u­ously to denote the mercu­r­ial tran­si­tions (“needle-drops”) which char­ac­ter­ize the piece.